Peachtree Road (99 page)

“If you’re referring to yourself, you’ve had an awful lot of privilege,” she said.

“You pay so goddamn dearly for the privilege of…privilege in this town,” I said stubbornly. I did not know why I could not let it go. “Look at Lucy.”

“Well, if you insist, then let’s do look at Lucy,” Dorothy said crisply. “What so terrible has happened to Lucy that she did not bring down on herself? She’s been loved, protected, taken care of….”

“But it wasn’t enough, and it wasn’t the right kind of love,”

I said. “The original covenant was broken—that her father would take care of her when she needed him—and she’s spent her entire life alternately trying to placate and punish him. Privilege didn’t help her there.”

“Many children have that covenant broken.” Her beautiful voice was soft and implacable. The woman who had felt sorrow and pity for little Lucy Bondurant was long vanished.

“But somehow Lucy just couldn’t get past it,” I said. “At the same time she realized he wasn’t going to come and take care of her, she got the message that she herself was essentially worthless and utterly unworthy of care, that nothing she did or ever could do by herself would be 778 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

enough to keep her whole and safe. That’s where all the anger and dependency and self-sabotage comes from.”

“Who gave her that message?” Dorothy was stirring restlessly on her rattan love seat.

“The old man,” I said. “The South. The South speaking through Willa and all the other women around her. Women, too—women did it to her, too.”

“But she’s seen strong women,” Dorothy said impatiently.

“Your mother was a strong woman, in her way. Old Martha Cater was a brick, and loved her dearly. I’m tough in my own way, too.”

“Yes, but you’re all strong in a man’s world, or were,” I insisted. “My mother as an accessory to a powerful man, at least to outward appearances. Martha as a servant in that man’s house. You were a lioness in that hospital, Dorothy, but it was men who owned and ran it. Lucy happened to want it all. Unheard of, for a Southern woman. Not, of course, for any sorry man in shoe leather, but for a woman…”

“And who ever gave her that notion?” Dorothy Cameron said tartly. “Nobody else I know ever had it all, man or woman, past the age of thirteen. Oh, don’t bother to answer, it’s the Bondurant in her, of course. You always were the wantingest tribe I ever saw.”

“Except me,” I said.

“Oh, Shep, you most of all! Don’t you remember all those passions of yours when you were small? Look at you—you’ve been in a twenty-year tantrum because you lost part of what you wanted. You’ve been saying, ‘If I can’t have it all, I’ll reject it all.’ You’ve let an awful lot of good go. You let an entire world go not two weeks ago. It’s not Lucy who’s the victim, it’s you. And God help you, it is quite beyond you to change that now.”

I was silent, feeling the old, dead blackness of New Year’s Eve well up from its headwater deep within me. Her words seemed to me an immutable condemnation.

PEACHTREE ROAD / 779

“Tough words,” I said, finally.

“I wouldn’t waste them on many people left on this earth, my dear,” she said. “I have loved you most of your life. I wanted better for you than you have chosen for yourself.”

“What is this, chopped liver?” I said, attempting lightness.

I patted the manuscript in her lap.

“This is marvelous,” she said. “A
tour de force
. A fine ap-petizer. Now, what about the next twenty years?”

“I really hadn’t thought about it,” I said, the blackness fleeing like fog before a sharp wind of panic. I had not. The pile of pages mounting in their slowness through the years had seemed sufficient, complete in themselves. What
about
the next twenty-five years? I saw whirling whiteness ahead, and nothing else.

“Well, you’d better get your ass in gear,” Dorothy Cameron said matter-of-factly. “Because I’m tired and I want to die sometime soon, and I absolutely will not do it until I know you’ve got something to occupy you. On your head be it if I live to be a miserable, mewling, puking centenarian.”

“Dorothy, I think I’d just as soon die when you do,” I said, nakedly and honestly. The thought of Atlanta without her was not to be borne.

She was quiet for a long time.

“Please live,” she said at last, in a frail, light, infinitely weary voice. There were tears in the corners of her great, hooded amber eyes. “Please find a way, finally, to live.”

I left her then, thinking as I loped down Peachtree Road toward 2500, cold in the perpetual blueness of shadows from the beetling, blind-eyed buildings on either side, that when she was gone there would be very few people left in my world who might wear the term “fineness.” Only her daughter came to mind.

780 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Lucy continued to do so well in her job and at home on the farm that Malory called me just before Christmas of her sophomore year and asked if I thought it would be all right to bring her friend from Boston and Marblehead home.

“I think,” she said, and I could hear the tentative joy in her voice, “that he may be going to ask me to marry him!”

“Oh, Mal—” I said, stricken, and then caught myself. I had been about to shout at her, “No! No! Too young, you’re too young…”

“Does he have a name?” I asked instead.

“John Hunter Westcott the Fourth,” she said, laughing a little over the name. “Is that perfect, or is it perfect? Jinx, of course. He’s tall and blond and cool and beautiful, and he’s so impeccably bred that you’d think he had ‘Groton-Harvard-Wall Street’ stamped on his aristocratic behind. He doesn’t, though. What he has is a severe case of Long Island lockjaw and a place waiting for him in his father’s and grandfather’s impeccable WASP law firm. You’ll probably hate him.”

“I can’t wait for that pleasure,” I said honestly. “I assure you that I will hate him, and as openly and nastily as I can.

I’m going to tell him all about your many eccentricities and hideous hidden habits, and send him yelping back to Marblehead, or wherever.”

“Lord, don’t,” she said, only half teasing. “Mother is going to be quite enough. But they have to meet him, and he wants to know them. Do you think she can handle it?”

I thought about it for a bit, and then said, “I think she can, if he doesn’t try to count her teeth. I wouldn’t say anything about marriage, though, Mal. It might just be better to let it be a casual visit.”

“I won’t. But she’s going to know,” Malory said.

“Probably. But she won’t know for sure unless you talk about it.”

PEACHTREE ROAD / 781

“I won’t, then,” she said. “You’re probably right. Okay, I’ll call her right now. Can I bring Jinx by to meet you the day after we get home?”

“Oh, by all means,” I said. “I’ll dig out my old club tie.

Would you like me to meet you at the airport and drive you out? Soften the first minutes a little?”

“No,” she said. “I think she’d rather I brought him there to them first.”

And so I did not go to the farmhouse with Malory and her cool, aristocratic and altogether perfect captive Brahmin, and I have regretted that every day of my life since. It was only afterward that I learned what happened that evening, and by that time Malory was back in Massachusetts determined that she would never look upon her mother again.

Jack had met their plane and driven them out to Lithonia in the ancient Ford, and I am sure Jinx Westcott was as gentlemanly about it as he must have been appalled. Lucy had decorated the farmhouse from rafters to hearth with evergreens from the woods and the battered ornaments they had bought when Malory was born, and I think that it probably looked, in its festive dress and the warmth of the leaping fire and candlelight, as well as it could ever look, though by then the old house had sagged past genteel shabbiness and into outright dilapidation. I am certain Jinx was a gentleman about that, too. What, if anything, went on in the elegant brainpan behind the cool blue Nordic eyes, narrowed by the stenosis of centuries of breeding, is another matter. Malory could not tell me that.

What she did tell me was that it was not she, but Jinx Westcott, who said to Lucy, as she and Malory worked in the kitchen and Jack nodded with his drink before the television set, “That looks terrific, Mrs. Venable. I hope Mal got your talent in the kitchen as well as your looks. None of the women in my family can cook

782 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

worth a damn, and I refuse to go through a lifetime of Stouffer’s.”

Lucy turned her blue, blue eyes to the blond young demigod in her ramshackle kitchen.

“Aren’t you nice?” she drawled. “I can tell your mama raised you right. Will you be a sweetie and go see if Lucy’s father would like another drink?”

When Jinx Westcott strode manfully off into the living room, she turned to Malory.

“Well, darling. Secrets?” she caroled.

“I think maybe he’s going to ask me to marry him, Mama,”

Malory said in a subdued voice, her heart hammering.

“Well,” Lucy said. “He has a nice ass.”

It should have tipped Malory off. It would have me. But Malory was blinded by hope, and Jack was drugged with scotch and Dan Rather, and no one saw the level in the scotch bottle that Jack kept on the kitchen counter dropping, dropping, as Lucy cooked. By dinnertime, when Malory and Jinx Westcott came in to lay the table, Lucy had turned abruptly and staggeringly drunk, bestial and hectic and mad-eyed, mumbling and stumbling and laughing and letting herself fall heavily against Jinx.

Malory fled wordlessly to the living room to fetch Jack. It took her some little time to rouse him. When they returned to the kitchen, they found Lucy, skirt pulled up and panties down around her thin white ankles, squirming in the lap of the appalled John Hunter Westcott IV, crying aloud with the shrill mindlessness of a deranged cuckoo clock, “I want to
come
! I want to
come
!”

She began to scream then, when Malory and Jack attempted to pull her off Jinx Westcott’s lap, and she screamed long past the time the ambulance came to take her to Central State—for all the other hospitals in the area had by then declared her unwelcome. Lucy in her

PEACHTREE ROAD / 783

madness scratched, kicked and bit; her rage was endless. Her screams still rang in the empty air of the farmhouse when the Lithonia taxi came to take a white, punished Malory and a politely arctic John Hunter Westcott IV to the airport. I thought that Malory would hear them always, in her head.

“I will never see her again as long as I live,” she sobbed to me when I called her at school, after the news came from a half-drunk and exhausted Jack Venable that Lucy had been hospitalized again. “I don’t care if she’s sick—I don’t care!

I will
not
see her again!”

And she broke down completely, and hung up the phone.

I replaced the receiver in the summerhouse, swearing in my heart that if I could prevent it, she would not indeed.

Lucy might be past my help, but Malory would,
must
, be saved.

Something happened to Lucy at Central State. To this day we are not sure what it was. The physician on staff swore he found no evidence of a stroke, and Hub Dorsey, when I called him in, verified that.

“Nothing on the EEG,” he said. “Nothing anywhere else to indicate vascular trouble. Whatever it is, it isn’t stroke.”

What it was was a calmness, a lethargy almost, so profound that she did not require the usual tranquilizers and antidepressants but sat dreaming and nodding in the dayroom for hours at a time, often humming a little to herself, and almost always smiling. It was as if something had, at last, truly eased the flame in her, though when I visited I could see in her blue eyes the small, stubborn spark of intelligence which had not yet, through all the horror and pain, been quenched. She could move as well as ever. It simply seemed that she did not often choose to do so. And she did not speak. We did not know for a long time whether she had lost the function or

784 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

whether she just considered that matters had gone beyond speech entirely. Whatever it was, she seemed tranquil and docile and quite often content.

I thought then that the electroconvulsive therapy they gave her there had simply short-circuited some intricate and vital circuitry in her fevered brain. I still think that is what happened, although an entire phalanx of overworked young doctors assured us it did not and could not.

I thought it far more probable that they simply did not know whereof they spoke than that they wished to circumvent legal trouble from a patient with a professional husband, for it was obvious to even the casual observer by then that Jack Venable was in no shape to pursue a lawsuit, and besides, he had signed an elaborate waiver of responsibility when he had committed Lucy.

So she sat in her silence, smiling and thinking of who knew what, as lost to us without the connecting bridge of words as if she had died. I think both Jack and I, in our hearts, were furtively glad to see her so. I, at least, felt simple relief. We, as well as she, were released from the torment of the fire in Lucy.

In three or four months she began to speak, but she spoke only in erratic bursts, sometimes muttering abrupt words and sentences that made no sense. I knew that the gibberish had meaning for her, for she often smiled in tender delight after completing a string of the heartbreaking nonsense, and looked up at me as if awaiting a reply. I did not know what to say, and could not bear the wounded sentences that spilled from her pretty mouth and tumbled to earth like slain birds, so I resorted to the old anodyne of her early hospitalization.

“Stick it in your ear, Luce!” I would shout gaily, and Lucy would clap her hands and put her finger into her ear, and her blue eyes would spill light like kisses, and she PEACHTREE ROAD / 785

would crow, “Stick it in your ear! Stick it in your ear, Gibby!”

It was the only coherent sentence she made for many, many months.

They could not keep her indefinitely at Central State, and in all ways except for the speech she seemed well—or as well as, now, she would ever be. And so we brought her home.